Should you be worried about bad INTERNET reviews?

88% of consumers are influenced by on-line reviews. If you have negative ones showing up for branded/direct searches, kiss that customer goodbye.

In short, yes. Especially if your reviews are on a platform other than your website (e.g. Facebook or comparison websites). However, if you provide a good quality product or service then you should not have anything to worry about.

It is worth, however, thinking about a backup plan if you are faced with a bad review. If I ever have a complaint, I am far more likely to put it on social media because it is where more people are likely to see it. It is also most likely to prompt a response from the place I’m complaining to.

The best ways to deal with negativity:

1. Always apologize – Whether or not it is your fault, the customer is always right and if they’ve felt disgruntled enough to write a complaint, then it is worth defusing the bomb before it goes off.

2. Offer some sort of concession as an apology. A R100 off voucher, 25 percent their next order or simply a cheap freebie.

3. Learn from your mistakes. Sometimes a customer’s complaint is valid. They’ve had a bad experience and they feel ripped off. I imagine that is not the experience you wanted to create when you started your business.

Find out where it went wrong and implement a process to change it in future.

Google = Website Technical Preparation

These relate to on-page factors that are not directly linked to a page’s content, but do contribute to the search engine reading your site.

• Keywords are diminishing in importance. Google understands semantics and wants you to develop content that’s interesting to read, not crammed with repetitive keywords.

• The fundamentals such as highly optimized pages, meta descriptions and H tags are hugely important as they help make your pages skimmable and scannable.

• Loading times will have an impact.

• Domains with a high SEO visibility have higher rankings with their URLs (they have built a good reputation in the search engine).

The report is packed with excellent advice, especially the part about the diminishing role in of keywords as a ranking factor. Hopefully, that will mean we can kiss goodbye to those awful sites that cram every inch of their design with keywords.

SEO Strategy = The Irreplaceable Human Touch

There is no set formula for SEO success. Yet, there are certain aspects of optimization which will help achieve the desired effect; if they are managed correctly.

The first is user experience, or UX, of a website. If you are building or optimizing a website intended to be visited by people, it needs human insight to be truly effective. Things like reduction of bounce rates, time on site, and nurturing leads through the sales funnel requires human analysis. There are, of course, tools to assist, but the decision-making process needs human intervention to be successful.

Development of marketing strategies is another SEO element that you cannot put bots in charge of. Gathering target audience insights, constructing marketing plans and messaging, and strategic planning all tap into human emotions to get consumers to engage with a campaign. Automation services and software are simply not capable of understanding human emotion and, therefore, make poor marketers.

The same goes for PR. Public relations is all about human-to-human connections. Creating personal connections with bloggers, journalists and those who can help you acquire guest posts, features, and backlinks requires manual work and effort.

In a digital environment littered with content, content marketing is another aspect that needs a person to manage and oversee. You, or a content manager, need to create compelling and useful topics, write engaging materials that touch on human pain points, and obtain proper placement to get your materials seen.

For some things, there is just no replacement for a good old-fashioned human efforts. For other things, however, bots are just what the doctor ordered.

This is a suggested – Plan Before Your Writing SEO Content.

If you follow these tips you should be able to write SEO-friendly content which your reader will find informative and feel like you are talking to directly to them.

1. Plan before you write. Before you even begin writing you need to think about what you want to tell your reader. Then plan for the tone, the purpose, and what you want your readers to do by the end of the post. Do you want them to purchase something, join an e-mail list, or leave a comment? When you have a good grasp of where you want to go with this post then begin writing.

2. Headers. When you begin writing, you need to use headers and subheaders. The reason for using headers and subheaders is so that you can use keywords better and your article is easily skimmed. Articles that can be skimmed easily are much more likely to be shared.

3. Write informative and engaging material for your readers. The more informative and engaging the article the more it is shared, upping your trustworthiness. It is also better for ranking in the search engines.

4. Don’t short-change the length of your content. If you can make your point in 600 words, then use 600, otherwise, keep writing until the information you are giving is complete and reads naturally.

5. Optimize the images you use. Images are an important element in making your content interesting and shareable. People will share your content more easily and are much more likely to make a purchase if there is an image of the product you are selling. Make sure the picture loads quickly and has keywords in the description of the picture Meta tags.

6. Pay attention to your keywords; place them according to the word count and structure of your article. One thing you do not want to do is stuff your article with keywords. Stuffing will lose you page ranking. Choose your keywords before you start writing — it is then easier to build your topic around the keywords.

7. Set your work apart from others with a unique point of view. Share your experience of a product or service with a story of how it worked or didn’t work, what you liked or disliked, and if you could change something to make it better what it would be. This is sure to engage your reader and set your work apart from others.

The tips above will help you when writing your content so it is informative, authoritative, and shareable.

This will help you in the search engine rankings as well as garner links from other well-known high-ranking writers.

Repurposed old content is an SEO goldmine.

Once you have compiled your list of cadaverous content, you can begin reworking these pieces to drive a new wave of results.

The first step in this process is to determine if there have been any new happenings or recent developments on your topic since the original piece was produced; you want your content to be as up-to-date and accurate as possible.

Next, it’s wise to conduct keyword research again. If your content is more than a year old, the best words and phrases to leverage may have changed. A few years back, long-tailed keywords did not have the power they do today. Mobile and voice-to-text search have both greatly altered the way people present queries; this needs to be taken into consideration when formulating your keyword strategy. Also, be sure to optimize your publication for semantic search by including companion keywords, utilizing synonyms and variations of words, and writing in your audience’s organic language.

With older pieces of content, there is a good chance that many of the links that were once present are now broken; remove any of these defunct portals. Take things further by strengthening your internal linking through incorporating hyper-links to other relevant content that holds authority. Additionally, you will want to bolster the number of links to respected websites. High authority sites are those such as reputable news sources, educational sites and other trusted and high-ranking pages. Search engines take into consideration these types of links, giving your content credit as a more trustworthy destination.

Once you have updated your content to include more current information, relevant and high-ranking keywords, and plenty of authoritative internal and external links, it is time to promote it all over again. Publish the piece on various social media websites, send out the update to your email subscribers, push it to the homepage of your web-page; use all the tricks in your marketing toolkit. People won’t be interested in your newly revamped content if they don’t know that it exists.

Not all content needs to be deeply researched and created from scratch. You can save tons of time and energy by simply resurrecting old content with new information and allowing it to work its magic all over again. The key is to make sure that you abide by today’s best practices, incorporate the most cutting edge information possible, and to be sure that your offerings are useful by offering up direct answers to some of the most common questions your audience has. Don’t let your old brilliant ideas become irrelevant.